Content distribution, especially video distribution, is continuing to move away from traditional broadcast mediums to online and over-the-top distribution. New tools are needed to aid in this transition. With respect to video, new tools are needed to efficiently create the content, bring the content online, and distribute the content. Accordingly, there is a need for better video editing, manipulation, encoding, transcoding, and distribution tools.
Clipping is the process of cropping or selecting one or more portions of a video asset or streaming asset and preserving the one or more portions as new video asset. The video assets that are generated from different portions of existing video assets are referred to as snippets.
A snippet can be used to present or promote existing video content through alternative formats. For instance, a snippet from a broadcast news report can be used to enhance an online text based article relating to the same report. A snippet can also be used as a trailer, advertisement, or teaser for promotional purposes.
Traditional snippet generation involves an editor identifying a start marker and an end marker somewhere within an original video asset. A clipping tool then re-encodes the portion of the original asset falling within the start marker and end marker clip boundaries in order to produce the snippet from the original asset.
Clipping in this manner is inefficient for several reasons. Re-encoding the portion is expensive in terms of time and computer resources. The longer the snippet, the longer the re-encoding time. Moreover, these resources are expended in performing a redundant operation, namely encoding a portion of video from an already encoded original asset in order to simply extract and reproduce the portion of video as a separate and independent asset from the original asset. This redundant encoding also results in reduced quality as encoding is a lossy process. A snippet that is produced from encoding an already encoded asset will suffer some quality loss and a subsequent snippet encoded therefrom suffers even greater quality loss.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved video clipping and snippet generation. In particular, there is a need to efficiently generate a snippet from an existing video asset, wherein the efficient generation reduces or eliminates the time and computer resources expended to re-encode the video portion of the snippet, and further reduces or eliminates the quality loss resulting from the re-encoding.